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28.12.04

Can a woman be President?

I must admit that I was skeptical about dismissing the possibility of a woman being allowed to be elected President of the United States. In order to follow the argument I'll make, one need only apply basic logic and accept the premise that the Founders of The United States of America who wrote the Constitution used spacing, capitalization, punctuation and word choice extremely carefully.

Throughout Article 2 of the Constitution, the word "he" or "his" is used at least 17 times. The word "she" or "her" is not used.

Federalist Papers #68, 69, 73, and 74 make repeated references to he, him, the man, etc...

POINT 1: The founders only used the masculine pronoun in their writings, both editorial and legally binding documents alike. I have a hard time believing that those men considered for one minute that a woman could or should be President. Recall, these were mostly Christian men who adhered to relatively fundamental Biblical practices, certainly the election of a woman to the highest office was not their intent.

Amendment XXV makes repeated reference to "he" and "his", but again no reference to "she" or "her".

POINT 2: Even as of the mid-sixties, the Constitution of the United States contained no references or language suggesting the ability or legality of any woman holding the office of the President. Now the modern "enlightened" American must be thinking that certainly the terms "he" and "him" refer to either gender, especially in the manner in which we currently "interpret" the Constitution.

Amendment XIX specifically says that gender may not be used against a person when determining voter eligibility.

POINT 3: If the word "he" actually referred to both genders, why would an amendment be necessary to end the practice of disqualifying women from voting? Surely a challenge of such laws to the Supreme Court would have been much easier to attain and achieve than the lofty requirements of amending the Constitution. This is the same argument as can be made for the 15th amendment and the use of race or prior servitude status to preclude voting priveleges. Why did newly freed slaves need an amendment to the Constitution to declare them equal to their white counterparts for voting purposes if the 13th and 14th amendments already said so?

POINT4: Ultimately, the movement by women around the turn of the 20th century resulted in dramatic changes in American culture. The original intent of the Constitution was to permit only eligible white males the privelege of voting. The 15th amendment extended the privelege to otherwise eligible black men, while the 19th amendment did the same for women. On the same lines, I think it's fair to assume that the original intent of the Constitution was for men to be President, implicitly white males. In the absence of any subsuquent and contrary language altering the original intent, I argue that as of today, only a white male may be elected to the office of the President of the United States according to our Constitution.